Authentic Forgery/Forged Authenticity

artistic statement

That quote irks me. Not because I have anything against stealing. Click
here if you think
I have qualms in that regard. My problem with the quote is that Picasso
undervalued the art of imitation, of forgery. I believe it takes a true
artist to be a great forger.

Here is another quote from Picasso:

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

Of course, it should be noted Picasso died in 1973, years before
personal computers influenced the way art was created. There is no way
of knowing whether Picasso would employ a computer today. I suspect he
might, but not in an extensive, hands-on fashion. Computers are
humbling, and Picasso was anything but humble. His art was driven by
ego. Artists working with computers need to be open to the possibility
that creativity is contingent upon algorithmic processes beyond their
control. Picasso was a control freak. I believe Picasso's contemporary,
Alberto Giacometti, would have loved computer-based
art. Giacometti was an ambitious artist, not an egotistical one. He was
fascinated by design and process. Giacometti's fame rests on his
sculptures, which tactilely honed human perspective down to its barest
essence; but he also produced prints and drawings illustrating this
process. Exploring graphics on a computer would have taken it to another
level, allowing Giacometti to lose himself in the most magical thing
about computers: shear abstract processing. Alas, Alberto Giacometti
died in 1966.

Keith Haring died in
1990 at the tender age of thirty-one. The personal computer revolution
flowered during the course of his career. To my knowledge, Haring never
utilized a computer; however, it should be noted that the web first came
into existence at the time of his death. The Internet had been around
for years, but not the web, which is what brought the Internet into
countless homes all over the world. Haring was a public artist, who, I
believe, would have relished the publicly transparent nature of the web.

In the early 1980s the New York City subway system became an organic
palette for art. Graffiti defined a process, which Keith Haring came
to refine, transform, and commercialize. Clearly, Haring wanted to reach
a mass audience. He went after that audience by tapping into raw icons
that could never be appreciated in the static environment of museums or
galleries. Such art demanded to be experienced either in a spiritual
space (Michelangelo's The Last Judgment, painted on the ceiling and altar
wall of the Sistine Chapel) or in the midst of vibrant street
life (Diego Rivera's politically charged murals, which, to some extent,
inspired the urban Graffiti boom that helped shape Keith Haring).

Recently, 7 purportedly original Keith Haring subway station tiles came
into my possession. "Purportedly original"? In other words, almost
certainly forgeries. Nonetheless, the 10 images contained on the tiles
(3 of which had images on both sides) were potent. Laurie Spiegel
photographed the tiles with her digital camera, uploaded the photographs
to my computer, whereupon I set about sampling the images and creating
Authentic Forgery/Forged Authenticity, the set of animations for
which these words serve as an artistic statement. Supposedly, the tiles
stemmed from 1983, a time when the twin pandemics of AIDS and crack
cocaine erupted in New York City, especially in Lower Manhattan, where
Keith Haring actually did make drawings in subway stations, albeit not
on tiles, but on the blank paper in unused advertising panels.

The forger who drew the images on these tiles knew only that Keith
Haring made drawings in subway stations; therefore, he assumed the
drawings were on wall tiles. This proved a fortuitous mistake in that it
added to the imagery's iconic power by lending an archaeological or
artifact quality. Time and place resonate in artifacts. The 7 subway
station tiles themselves are almost certainly genuine subway station
tiles. Can they be scientifically dated to the early 1980s? Under the
circumstances, who cares? What matters is that upon casual physical
examination, they have the look and feel of subway station tiles from
the period. One tile is cracked, a couple are chipped.

In tribute to Keith Haring the animations comprising Authentic
Forgery/Forged Authenticity are direct, brief. Each animation
consists of 20 frames, with frame durations varying from a 10th of a
second to 3/4 of a second, prior to looping. I feel a tad awkward
including Authentic Forgery/Forged Authenticity in the Fragmented Animated
Texts section of Illumination Gallery because on the surface its 10
animations are scarcely animated texts; yet, deep down, they are, even
if not in the original
sense of what I had in mind when I first experimented with digitally
melding image and text. Here the melding is more abstract. These very
words are the text being animated. Besides, Keith Haring himself mixed
image and text. Ultimately, Authentic Forgery/Forged Authenticity
represents a second launching of Illumination Gallery, expanding my
artistic vision both graphically and in terms of my understanding of
working in a public medium. Giacometti influenced me in the former
respect, Keith Haring in the latter.